This study analyzes native Russian speakers’ evaluation of seven Russian yes/noquestions
each produced by Finnish speakers in two sets of recordings (during a stay
in Russia and after it). The Finnish speakers were six female university students of
Russian. This research question is interesting because the two typologically unrelated
languages differ in the prosody of yes/no-questions. In Russian a yes/no-question is
created from a lexically and syntactically corresponding statement by means of
intonation, whereas in Finnish the cue for questioning is an interrogative particle –
ko/-kö instead of prosody. Hence, native Finnish speakers are likely to have
difficulties in pronouncing Russian yes/no-questions. The aim was to find out how
native Russian speakers recognise the intended questions produced by Finnish
learners. First, the recognition rate of the different yes/no-questions was studied, and
then the acceptability rating of questions was computed. The results show that in
general students did not perform very well in producing a yes/no-question, but there
was great variation depending on the question and learner. According to the
successfulness of production two groups of utterances were established: successful
and non-successful ones. The statistically significant difference between the two was
explained by their syntactical and lexical content. The conclusions made are
supportive of earlier findings, where Russian question intonation has been found
difficult for Finns to learn.

en

dc.language.iso

eng

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Rice Linguistics Society

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Rice Working Papers in Linguistics

dc.rights

openAccess

fi

dc.subject.other

phonetics

en

dc.subject.other

speech perception

en

dc.subject.other

prosody

en

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intonation

en

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second language

en

dc.title

How do native speakers of Russian evaluate yes/no questions produced by Finnish L2 learners?